Return of the Teddies

SmoothTeddy is a old (2003) small 3D sketching app developped by Takeo Igarashi that can produce simple organic shapes.It's UI is minimalist and kid oriented, making it a perfect 3D modeling toy for children.The drawback is... there is no way to export your Teddies.

Really no way ? Let's have a look...

SmoothTeddy is great for 7 years old kids or more because they can easily make good simple 3D models with it.

But not being able to export their creation for 3D printing was something really frustrating.I had to find a way to convert meshes done in SmoothTeddy to a printable 3D format...

The only format SmoothTeddy can export to is ".asg" which is a format I had never heard about before.Making some research I found out it's an Alice file format.So I went this route.

I opened my Teddy.asg in Alice2 and from there exported it as Teddy.a2c.I then changed the .a2c to .zip and uncompressed it.This gave me 2 files : "indices.bin" and "vertices.bin" (which are not readable)

After downloading 3D Object Converter, I was able to open "indices.bin" and see my Teddy on screen !From there I new it was going to work !Just did a "Save as" --> SmoothTeddy.obj (or STL) et VOILA !!!

It works.But the problem is that in its free version the 3D converter (an excellent one by the way) skips 1 polygon out of 5 on export, resulting in holes in the mesh.But this can easily be repaired because, by nature, Teddies are quiet low-polygon models.You could easily do it in SU (a bit long if there are a lot of missing polygons) or with an automatic repair from Window's native 3Dbuilder.

You now have your Teddy in a classic 3D format which should let you do almost anything you wish including printing.

From there I guess you know what to do next.

Wait... isn't there any simplest way to convert my Teddies ?

I must admit that the procedure above is a bit long...But that's the only way I found after a LOT of researches!And this test was crucial as a POC (Proof of concept) before any further development.

I had found a guy claiming he had done a "Teddy to OBJ" converter but never found any download link.And after contacting him, I never received any answer.

So... what can we do next ?

Try to convince my friend Nicetuna to develop a specific tool ?With my POC and the tests I had done I asked him if he could have a look at my problem.And after a few days he came back with his homemade converter : ASG2OBJ.